Invisible Lines of Connection

Invisible Lines of Connection

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, from Sudbury, Massachusetts, has written a number of books. One of them, Invisible Lines of Connection, is a collection of stories of observations of life events about Book connections between people and God. Some of his insights include the blackness of night while on a ship when one sees a light house light. He notes "Each lighthouse has its own distinctive pattern of flashes, a coded light-message which enables the approaching mariner to identify his location on the chart…They are all that any lighthouse ever says: "this is who I am. This is who I am." Each of us has a similar unique identity. There is no one like us ever in all of history. Each of us has a similar code of singular identity.

When his father died he chose a Talmudic passage for the inscription on his tombstone which reads "Who is rich? He who is content with his portion." What a profound truth for us to contemplate

I like the story he tells about a member of his congregation who had confessed to his rabbi a  week before his bar mitzvah that he couldn’t go through with it,  because he didn’t believe in God. The rabbi thought a moment and said to him "What makes you think it matters to God?"

One of his chapters deals in trivia. In discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s great film, North by Northeast he says Eva Marie Saint is supposed to pretend to shoot Cary Grant to convince the character played  by James Mason of her loyalty. But, if you watch the lunch crowd in the scene there is a small child eating. As Eva Marie pulls the gun, the boy covers his ears. He’s rehearsed the scene enough times he knows what’s coming. And, he says, in the movie The Right Stuff, one of the young pilots, Sam Shepard,  playing the role of Chuck Yeager, gets advice from the bartender. The bartender is the real Chuck Yeager. His book is an entertaining short book worth reading.

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